


The Cancelled Skies

by Scarlet



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Old School, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-13
Updated: 2015-11-13
Packaged: 2018-05-01 11:20:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5203865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scarlet/pseuds/Scarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“This is the end of the world as we know it, Mulder. I'm drinking to that.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cancelled Skies

**Author's Note:**

> I'm putting this here because I've had this on my drive for a year, and need a kick up the ass to finish it. You might want to wait for it to be done to read it.

He found her in the bar adjacent to the hotel lobby. She'd washed her hair and it wasn't dry yet. Dark copper curls, that she once would have tamed into submission, hid most of her profile. She was leaning at the bar with both elbows on the counter. Her index finger was running in circles along the edge of a shot glass filled with something amber. If she heard him enter, she gave no indication.

He pulled up a stool to sit next to her. His eyes scanned the wide room. “Quiet day,” he commented, reaching for the squat bottle with the ornate crystal cap in front of her and examining the label. Gran Patròn. Tequila.

Her smile was small and didn't reach her eyes, but it still felt like a victory.

“It's still early,” she replied.

Holy fuck. She was playing along. He felt the fist of time pull him back sharply by the scruff of his neck. Back to his office; back to the field; back to their countless Lariat rentals. Back to the days when he took their verbal sparring for granted. He could hear the echoes of her voice from those distant days, her sarcastic put downs, the sexy scientific data she'd breathed in his ear, but he could not remember her laughter. It troubled him. She had laughed back then, hadn't she?

He brushed a hand over the dark oak surface in front of him and wiped his dusty fingers on his jeans. “The cleaning staff has been slacking off again,” he continued, hopeful.

“You can withhold their tips, ” she said, raising the glass to her lips.

He wanted to continue the exchange, because it was such a rare gift, but was distracted by the curve of her neck as she tossed her head back. How long had it been since--

She slammed her glass back down and the moment was lost.

He took her discarded glass and filled it up. “I'd pegged you for a whisky drinker,” he told her, tasting the liquor cautiously. She'd gone for the good stuff.

She shrugged but said nothing, pulling on the frayed sleeves of her navy sweater. He swallowed the shot, hoping alcohol would dull the sting of her silence.

It wasn't her fault. He had no clue what to say to her either. What was there left to say?

'I told you so' sounded so petty.

He filled the glass again.

“We could head south,” he told her.

She exhaled a short sharp scoff. “We wouldn't make it out of the city.”

“Skinner said there might be a way along the Potomac.”

“Skinner is dead.”

He hated her for saying it. For reminding him he hadn't been fast enough that day. The former Assistant Director had collapsed at his feet like a great oak struck by lightning.

“Death doesn't de facto make people wrong,” he snapped back, knocking back his drink.

Finally, finally, she looked up at him with something close to empathy and for an instant he thought she might apologize. Her hand closed on the glass he was still holding and gently pried it off him. She retrieved the bottle and served herself another shot.

“Okay, so, let's say we make it out of the city. Then what?”

Right. They were way past the point of apologies.

~

_“She's my mother Mulder!”_

_“You cannot save her.”_

_“Let me go!”_

_“You will die if I do.”_

_“But she's here, I can see her.”_

_“And so can they.”_

It had taken quite a bit of strength on his part to hold her down. Her body had shaken with fury against his as she struggled to break free, her fingernails scraping at the pavement. She'd bitten his hand when he'd forced her to look away so she wouldn't see her mother collapse by the fountain, legs folding underneath her like flower stems. It had been too late for Margaret Scully. But not for them.

He had felt her chest rise, had seen her mouth start to open. He'd had no choice but to knock her cold.

~

“We make it to the coast, we find a boat, head for an island--”

He made a move for the shot glass but she snatched it away. “Get your own.”

He shrugged and took a swig directly from the bottle instead.

“Classy, Mulder,” she railed. “Can you even drive a boat?”

“I can start an Evinrude. My father had a small speedboat in Quonochauntaug,” he explained. He missed the raised 'fancy boy' eyebrow she would have given him once upon a time.

She shook her head, “Mulder, no safe island is going to be within speedboat distance – if there is any such thing left as 'safe' anywhere.”

“They won't bother with islands for now.”

“How do you know?” She was rolling the glass back and forth between her fingers. He waved the bottle in her direction. She made a small nod. He filled her glass and took another healthy swig for himself.

“Because the farmer who harvests a field doesn't bother with the random wheat blades growing on the edges, it's just not worth the effort.”

“They're called 'ears', Mulder. Wheat ears.”

“Whatever. I'm no farmer.”

“My point exactly.”

~

They drank in silence for awhile. He welcomed the mellow white noise in his head. The bottle of Patròn was seeing some damage. They weren't being reasonable, they both knew it – but they weren't in immediate danger and it was the first real conversation they'd had in ages.

The arrogant bastards rarely doubled back, sure as they were of their efficiency. He and Scully had quickly realized the best way to stay relatively safe was to stay in areas they'd already swept and keep away from the drones that patrolled the streets and recorded everything.

6 months was all it had taken to turn the nation's capital into a ghost town.

Carnage. There was no other word for it. People ran and died. People stayed home and died. People fought and died. People tried to negotiate and – well, you get the idea.

Salvation had come from the most unlikely source: Skinner's desk. The A.D. had been complaining from the start that pens kept rolling off it. It had been a running joke between him and Kimberley. His office had its very own X-File.

One day he found out why. While retrieving a file from the floor, he noticed a slight indentation in the wood on the right bottom corner of his uneven desk. It revealed a hidden compartment, only big enough to hide a small, intricate key, rolled in thin paper. On the paper were the words: “If you found this, you deserve to know.” Then followed a thirteen-digit sequence of numbers. Then the word “Basement” and the letters “JEH”.

Skinner had called Mulder to ask if he knew anything about an oddly shaped keyhole in the vicinity of his old office. The former FBI agent had been bored out of his mind since his initial exile to West Virginia, so it didn't take much for him to jump on the first plane to Washington. After search the office for a couple of hours, the two pulled a row of metal shelves where printing paper was stocked and found the keyhole behind it. It had been covered by a piece of tape that had been painted to match the wall. Nobody was going to find it unless he knew what he was looking for.

And that's how they'd found the entrance to John Edgar Hoover's private bomb shelter.

This was the place where Mulder had carried an unconscious Scully after the Colonists had gotten to her mother. This is where the three of them had hidden while the world burnt above. The two men had felt like cowards, but over the years, they'd seen evidence enough of what the Colonists had been planning to know they weren't a match for what was coming. As for Scully, she barely talked to them after she woke up. She was angry. He didn't care. She was alive.

The Colonists had swarmed the cities in orderly fashion. First came the bees. Then the 'Vs' -- a name he'd coined for the lizard abominations that grew inside people's bodies. They took care of those who hadn't been infected. Then came the soldiers/bounty hunters/hybrids, the human looking types who took the shape of people's loved ones and finished the job.

He caught movement from the corner of his eye. His hand went automatically for the gun tucked in the back of his jeans. He'd checked out the handful of customers sitting in booths or at tables when he'd entered the room but they no longer posed a threat.

He felt her cool hand touch his wrist briefly.

“Rat,” she said.

He exhaled the breath caught in his chest. “Garçon, bring another bottle for the rodent,” he declared, louder than he should have.

“Mulder!” Scully growled.

“Sorry.”

“You're not sorry. You're looking for a fight and this is how I'm going to end up losing you,” she told him matter of factly before emptying her glass again.

He thought of pots and kettles and their relationships – he bit his tongue. No one had further use for clichés.

“Is this why you're getting drunk at 10 am on a Sunday morning?”

“Mulder, you have no clue what day or what time it is.” All watches had stopped working at Shit Storm O'Clock a while ago. Something to do with the Earth's magnetic field.

“It feels like 10 am on a Sunday,” he replied, one finger tracing the infinity symbol from a puddle of Tequila on the counter, “and you didn't answer my question.”

“This is the end of the world as we know it, Mulder. I'm drinking to that.”

“And you feel fine,” he added grimly.

“No. I don't.”

Fuck this. He leaned over, thrust his left hand in her curls and brought her face to his. She blinked at him with opal eyes, lips parting, more in surprise than invitation. He didn't wait any longer and kissed her hard, tasting the mix of $500 tequila and resentment in her mouth. He grabbed her by the waist and hoisted her out of her seat until she was leaning flush against him, the curves of her body a roller coaster blue-print under his roaming hands. It was too early on a maybe Sunday morning and she was drunk, and so was he, and it didn't matter because the world had ended months ago and here they were, kissing in a five star hotel with desiccated corpses and a lone rat for peeping Tom.

Until Scully broke the kiss, cursed, and slapped him.

All right. This, he could deal with. “Does that mean we're even?” he winced, rubbing his cheek.

“Not even close.”

“The drones were there Scully, there were at least three bounty hunters right behind them. Trying to get anywhere near your mother would have been suicide.”

The look she shot him could have re-iced the poles. “It was my choice to make.”

“Well, your choice sucked.”

Anger receded from her eyes like undertow. Her sigh was long, drawn, tired, and spoke of a defeat he was not ready to accept. “We lost, Mulder. We fought for twenty years and we lost. What is there left for us to do?”

He shrugged, “keep going. Like we always do.”

She gave him an undecipherable look and kissed him again, roughly, her tongue deep in his mouth, her fingers like claws against the back of his neck. He felt himself grow hard against her stomach.

“I will not bury you again,” she told him, her voice splintering. Her fingers were precise as ever as they went for his belt buckle.

“You won't have to,” he told her. The flare he caught in her eyes before he wrapped his arms around her was evidence enough she'd measured the ambiguity of his answer.

There was a corpse grinning at him in his field of vision, slumped in a brown leather tub armchair, wearing Chinos and the remains of a gray cable knit sweater. They must have been about the same height. He wanted to look away so he could enjoy the fact that one of Scully's hand had made its way inside his boxers, her lips hot and urgent against his clavicle, but the empty eye sockets held him.

Scully looked up as he went limp against her fingers. “My, the world really is ending,” she said.

He nodded towards the corpse, “let's get a room, Scully.”

She followed his gaze. “They're dead, Mulder,” she shrugged.

Only Scully would consider dead people as unobtrusive as furniture.

“And we're still alive. In the St Regis. A hotel we could never afford on our former G-people salary. A hotel with king-size beds and endless reams of Egyptian cotton.”

He nuzzled the soft skin below her ear. “Come on, Scully. Aren't you tired of bunk beds and sleeping bags? I know those high thread counts turn you on.”

She released him, gauging her options.

“There'd better be a fucking mini-bar.” She turned her heels and headed for the lobby without waiting for him as he zipped himself up, digesting her uncharacteristic profanity.

She rummaged behind the reception desk, opening and closing drawers and cabinets.

When she faced him, she held a heavy set of keys.

“Pick a number.”

“I think the suites are at the top.”

His ears registered the distinctive hum and his body moved. He shoved Scully to the floor behind the reception desk.

Their eyes met. She didn't make a sound. She'd heard it too.

Outside, drones were patrolling K Street; miniaturized versions of the type the US Army had been using in what had once been the Middle East. They looked like black paper planes toys, about 3 feet long.

That they could hear them was a good sign. The noisy ones only recorded data. Unlike the new models which were quieter and emitted a pulse that made people's ears bleed until they died. Mr. Crump had died for the Cause, it seemed.

Skinner had witnessed their terrible efficiency two months ago from a set of security cameras overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue that fed directly into their shelter. The three of them had taken turns keeping tabs on what was going on outside. The rag-tag group of government employees in torn and stained suits who had emerged from 9th Street didn't even hear the drones until they were right behind them. He was selfishly glad Skinner had been the one on camera duty when it happened. Hearing the report from their former boss had been hard enough. This had been the last time they'd seen any living soul outside the building.

The humming sound faded away quickly, but after a glance at one another they decided to stay put for awhile longer. Scully hugged her knees, resting her head against her forearms and closing her eyes. Mulder began reviewing their old cases in his head. Examining the evidence, remembering his initial theories and hers. It was an exercise he'd started a few weeks ago. It served no purpose but to prevent him from thinking about other things -- their current situation, the ever-tightening panic that turned his bowels to water, the slow burning rage he read day after day in Scully's eyes.

They emerged from behind the reception area maybe an hour later, crawling on the marble floor amidst the overstuffed chairs and low glass tables until they could get an unobstructed view of the street outside. Nothing. The drones were gone.

He stood up. Brushed up his jeans. “At least we know they're still canvassing the area,” he told Scully, watching her adjust the leather holster that never left her side.

“Remind me what you said–about us traveling South?” She'd found an Evian bottle behind the desk and was drinking from it.

He ignored the cut of sarcasm in her voice. “We just need to wait for the right opportunity. In the meantime, let's find a room. The higher the better. Away from the streets. There's plenty of food and water here. We can monitor the patrols from the roof. They won't stick around forever.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“My gut tells me so,” he took the bottle from her hand and emptied it.

Scully made a sound that sounded suspiciously like a scoff and headed towards the stairs.

The adrenaline rush had left him drained, cotton-legged. He trailed wearily after her. 

**Author's Note:**

> THANKS: to the wonderful estella_c for smashing beta.


End file.
